Character Donations 80 - 84

Letters on their chests so they can remember who they are?Unimaginative noun-names?Unlikely powers and abilities keyed completely to their noms de guerre?Dripping with hard-to-draw machinery and doodads?

Notice the matching YELLOW weaponry? Guess who they fought!

"Steamroller"."Jackhammer.""Scoopshovel.""Hardhat.""Rosie." (Okay, that one is marginally cleverer than the other names. It's a reference to Rosie the Riveter, icon of female empowerment in the worked-starved munitions industry of WWII. It won't save her, though. Besides, Stompa, whom we've already sent over to Marvel, needs a girlfriend.)

How cute. I'm not sure even Marvel could put these guys in a redeeming context (perhaps upgraded into foes of Iron Man?). Perhaps we should ship them directly to the G.I.Joe-iverse?

"Who did this?" as I so frequently shout at home. "Len Wein? Bad writer; bad!"

Oh, yes, there was a Purple Pile-Driver. He used to get regularly beaten up by (pre-crisis) Superman whenever the main story was some kind of introspective emotional thing but editorial mandated a specific number of pages of fight scenes.

I think this is his only cover appearence.http://www.comics.org/graphics/covers/97/400/97_4_0000464.jpgCover calls him just 'The Pile-Driver', but I think he was using 'Purple' inside the body even then.

The main thing is that this was a guy with a sort-of reasonable gimmick; a guys who could have been a credible villian for Batman or Green Arrow or even Atom, Hawkman, or the Flash. So naturally he spends his time robbing banks in downtown Metropolis and getting into fights with the Man of Steel...